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Friday, May 16, 2014

Fall of Empire

EMPIRE OF RAG & BONE

Since the
surrender of its fleet and the loss of the more vigorous Southern, Eastern and ‘New’
provinces, eight generations ago the body of the Successor Empire has
rotted.The empire contracts and spasms
- Postowns lay abandoned, the Tradetowns in revolt or dusty decline and the wide estates
of an unknown multitude of petty barons, atamans, viscounts, colonels, pashas,
nawabs and lairds teeter under the weight of preening desire, feud and a
nobility grown strange, reclusive, and horribly fecund. Even the Imperial capital, a metropolis for a
three hundred generations, is as a comatose patient, atrophied and so weakened
that it barely twitches in its most vile of fever dreams, reeking and tangled
amongst soiled sheets.

The howls of the
inbred and moronic Emperor echo from the empty and lightless windows of the
Imperial spires when the moon wanes.The rumormongers in the Dockwards whisper that He, the ‘sunshadowing light of the world’, hunts his
own misshapen children like a red gummed dog amongst the graceful arcades,
scuttling through the wreckage of five millennia of opulence.Only the amber masked priests of the Imperial
cult, and perhaps the more human of the hulking heredity Excubitores, their frames grown monstrous from generations of selective
breeding and the ancient magics poured into their sires, know or care about the
truth of these rumors.

Below, encircling the spires are the abandoned towers of the nobility,
where only a few families of ancient lineage, too destitute or cracked to leave
the pestilent canals, still molder, wearing court brocades, dusty and long
out of style. The high families might pass for ghosts as they scrabble awkwardly for sustenance, fishing bogs that
were once pleasure lagoons for creatures that were once pedigree carp and farming
stunted decorative pears from the tired dirt of roof gardens, amongst the broken
limbs of priceless statuary. Past this Mesatown a semblance of life returns, but
it is the riot of vermin and carrion eaters on a corpse.The neighborhoods of trade and commerce are
shells, where the people cling to forgotten tradition and the chanker of a pantomime
propriety.The only industry still
thriving is salvage or plunder, as the uncountable wealth of three millennia is
mined and traded at the rickety new docks, built from the beams of floundered
ships, and extending over the old river's bed from the ancient trade docks of ageless
white arcane stone.The traders are
foreign, their armed barges filled with barley, teff and amaranth.The princes among these merchants sell casks of cheaply
distilled clear brandy made from squash vines, but drink vintages dredged from
deep cellars, laid down when their forefathers still had tails and
ripping canines. The docks are ordered, protected
by a polyglot legion of cruel mercenaries, who wear the puissant, but ill-fitting
armor and badges of the 5th, 23rd and 207th
urban banners without irony and who serve only the whims of richest resurrectionist houses.

Through miles of mostly silent ruined city, life again reasserts itself
amongst the once happy hives of the arcane factors.The great assembly floors and towering stacks
are nothing but shells, overflowing with the armed camps of savages that sing twisted
reflections of the company songs dedicated to primordial forefathers’ patron
sorcerers.The sorcerers themselves are
long extinct, the scions of their most foolish apprentices ten generations
removed now raise fortresses of fragments and poorly maintained ancient artifacts
around the few Cornucopiam that still spew out enchanted sustenance to feed the feral workforce.

Even amongst this feculent mass there is profit to be made, and trade
that must be transacted.The Resurgent Powers
pick the corpse of the empire with armed bands of merchants, not ready to war
against the stone titans, still loyal to the seals of imperial nobles wantonly bickering amongst themselves until a foreign enemy appears.It is easier to send a legion of cunning
younger sons, and ambitious 3rd daughters to buy old magic and
tarnished silver with dross, trivialities and grain too rough for pigs.Each fortune seeker sets out on the bright, level,
glass of the Imperial road with a wagon or pack horse, a good sword and a full
measure of the vitality that has made the fractious Resurgents an ever
tightening ring around the Imperial heartland.